Measurement of blood flow in the heart and vessels using the Doppler effect is well known. Whereas the amplitude of the reflected waves is employed to produce black and white images of the tissues, the frequency shift of the reflected waves may be used to measure the velocity of reflecting scatterers from tissue or blood. Color flow images are produced by superimposing a color image of the velocity of moving material, such as blood, over the black and white anatomical image. The measured velocity of flow at each pixel determines its color.
Ultrasound imaging suffers from the inherent imaging artifact referred to as speckle. Speckle is the mottling found in the images produced from interference patterns of multiple receive echoes. This mottling is primarily caused by the null in the acoustic interference pattern, but other anomalies in the image, e.g., random electronic noise, can cause mottling. The acoustic nulls are accentuated by the log compression required to display the full dynamic range of the ultrasound image. These nulls appear as black holes in the image.
Since any parameter which changes the sum of the returning echoes will alter the speckle pattern, a number of conventional methods exist for reducing the speckle image artifact. Examples of such conventional methods include multiple transmit focussing, spatial compounding, frequency compounding and spatial low-pass filtering. The multiple transmit focussing, spatial compounding and frequency compounding techniques suffer from reduced frame rates, whereas spatial low-pass filtering has reduced resolution.